Seeing Palestine Through the Architecture Of Domination

“Tanks, roadblocks, refugees, bypass roads, columns of villagers on foot, ambulances driving haphazardly down improvised dirt paths—a great and awesome suffering is the view that the Israeli settler from Beth El sees every day from his window, and yet he remains indifferent." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
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Seeing Palestine Through the Architecture Of Domination
By Brian Johnston

A hilltop settlement in the occupied West Bank (Courtesy Pittsburgh Palestine Solidarity Committee)

IN AUGUST 2007 members of the Pittsburgh Palestine Solidarity Committee spent 11 days in Palestine on a visit organized by the Siraj Centre for Holy Land Studies based in Beit Sahour, close to Bethlehem. Those who want to understand the situation of the Palestinians cannot do better than sign up for this tour. Siraj also holds a summer camp each year, attended by students from all over the world. To better comprehend what it was we were seeing, we spent up to 13 hours a day visiting Palestinian and Israeli groups, popular committees and activists, Israeli human rights groups like B’Tselem (and one “refusenik”), illegal settlements (interviewing a settler), villages, towns and cities, the refugee camps, universities, and arts and theater groups.

After the experience of the ubiquitous checkpoints and omnipresent apartheid wall, our strongest shock was the sight of the settlements: alien fortress growths striding across the hilltops or clamped upon them like the fungi of aggressive sci-fi invaders. An architecture of domination disfigures the natural landscape, implicitly proclaiming its power over a subjugated people.

However, this architecture inadvertently carries an ironic subtext: the settlements do not belong in this landscape. They actually are hostile to it, brutally indifferent to its contours and texture. Their clumsy and intrusive incongruity reflects their origin in Ariel Sharon’s injunction to the colonizers—“to grab as many hilltops as they can…because everything we take now will stay ours. Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”1 They are therefore proclamations of triumphant pillage.

Their hilltop positioning as fortresses (like Crusader castles) reveals a desire not to live within the landscape but to “oversee” and dominate it. Rapidly constructed, uniform and sterile for all their luxury, settlements like that of Ma’ale Adumim near Jerusalem lack the texture of historical presence found in Palestinian communities.

By contrast, Palestinian towns and villages in the valleys emerge organically from their past intimate life with the land. They respect the land, following the natural contours they have pastured. In contrast to the meticulously laid out, uniform spaces of the settlements, the Palestinian towns are mostly makeshift, bustling, noisy, unkempt and crowded; the clusters of houses are individual, haphazard and human. They show a history of mutual accommodations and compromises over time, rather than resulting from any instant master plan for an ethnocratic utopia.

Old cities like Bethlehem, Hebron, Haifa, Nablus and Nazareth still possess much of the Ottoman architecture that is prized—and confiscated—in Israel. There are ruins, poverty and enforced neglect everywhere in Palestine; but even in the appallingly destitute and cramped refugee camps, continually invaded and battered by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), the communities possess a vibrancy and intimacy that the settlements lack.

Indeed, many of the heavily subsidized settlement houses remain empty, revealing that they never were a response to any housing need, only to the motive of asserting control. They were “built with the self-proclaimed aim of bisecting, disturbing and squeezing out the Palestinian communities. ...The question of whether there are a pair of eyes looking out of the windows of settlement houses becomes irrelevant as the effect of domination is achieved by the mere presence of these buildings.”2

As commuter colonies they are wholly dependent on Jews-only highways to distant Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Isolated, with no contact with the immediately surrounding land, they resemble defensive outposts preparing for a time of siege. “Settlers talk to the camera in front of their newly built homes. The sense of an ideal and luxurious rural life is contrasted with the violence of its setting seen through the window or over the fence.”3

Like the similarly isolated gated and guarded communities in the United States, they may be intimations of a future dystopia where the world’s wealthy defend their walled-in communities against the increasing multitudes of the poor who grow more desperate as the planet’s resources are pillaged beyond repair. As Naomi Klein writes in The Shock Doctrine—the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, “This is what a society looks like when it has lost its economic incentive for peace and is heavily invested in fighting and profiting from an endless and unwinnable War on Terror. One part looks like Israel; the other part looks like Gaza...In South Africa, Russia and New Orleans the rich build walls around themselves. Israel has taken this disposal process a step further: it has built walls around the dangerous poor.”

The settlements cannot escape the appearance of being alien to the terrain in spite of occasional cosmetic olive trees uprooted from their natural, productive life in the land. Once they supported the now devastated families who tended them. The transplanted olive trees point to a malaise at the heart of the utopian project. Disconnected from any intimate history with the land and its people, refusing to admit the motives and means by which they now claim ownership, the settlers reconfigure the land as a magic space between a semi-mythic biblical past and a utopia in the making. Substituting fantasy for reality, such “attachment” to the land is less like love than pornography. (“Menorah Katzover, the wife of a prominent settler leader, said of the view of the West Bank mountains from her living room windows in the settlement of Homesh, ‘It causes me such excitement that I cannot even talk about in modesty.’”)4

Interfering with the fantasy, however, are the Palestinian people and their undeniable, long established imprint on the land. Settlement real estate agents actually encourage in their customers what they term “a process of landscape interpretation …what the settlers think they see (a pastoral biblical landscape and its figures)” magically transforms “what the settlers really see—the daily life of Palestinians and their poverty under occupation. Within this panorama lies a cruel paradox: the very thing that renders the landscape ‘biblical’—its traditional habitation and cultivation in terraces, olive orchards, stone buildings—is produced by the Palestinians, the very people whom the settlers would like to displace.”5

Such crass insensitivity has become the self-inflicted condition of a whole culture that, if it actually did see, might recoil in shame. The head of the architecture department in Ariel College in the West Bank “…claimed that his architecture students watching out of their classroom windows ‘see the Arab villages, but don’t notice them. They look and they don’t see.’” This would seem to any normal person the confession of a lamentable deficiency in his students—but the professor proudly adds, “And I say this positively.”6

Israel, with its complicit partner, the United States, has managed to infect much of the world with this moral blindness. Israeli tourist guides quickly usher flocks of credulous visitors away from the inconvenient facts of a cruel occupation to indulge in exercises in utopian “landscape interpretation.” U.S. evangelicals and congressmen, thus indoctrinated, relay the fantasy wholesale to their congregations. An alternative-reality Israel has been brought into being as the recipient of its admirers’ ardent devotion and dollars. Refusing to see its shared humanity with its victims, Israel willfully has become a land of the blind.

Convenient blindness has been a long established Israeli tradition: “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.”7

Thus Golda Meier in 1969, wiping a whole people off the map by repeating the myth of “a land without a people” against all evidence—and which even the early Zionists soon realized was false. The myth is necessary, however, so that Israeli Jews need never see the people they have dispossessed, never need to engage with those on whose land and often in whose houses they are living. The arrogantly dismissive demeanor of most Israelis toward the continuing suffering, devastation and humiliation of those they have dispossessed constitutes a communal moral insensitivity approaching actual evil.

Gideon Levy describes a scene that confronts a settlement’s inhabitants every day:

“Looking to the east, near the military court and the base, the settler will be able to discern a long line of Palestinian villagers walking silently alongside the fences, in the shadow of the tanks. Children and the elderly, pregnant women and sick patients carry their bags as the turret of a tank throws its threatening shadow upon them. These are the residents of the nearby villages who have no other way of reaching their regional town, Ramallah, other than on foot. They walk six or seven kilometers in each direction in order to get to work, to stores or to the clinic. The settlers’ cars cruise by on the bypass roads open only to Jews.

“Tanks, roadblocks, refugees, bypass roads, columns of villagers on foot, ambulances driving haphazardly down improvised dirt paths—a great and awesome suffering is the view that the settler from Beth El sees every day from his window, and yet he remains indifferent.

“It is difficult to understand how, among some 200,000 settlers, there is not one person who has the integrity to stand up and admit that his settlement, along with all the others, is causing all this pain and suffering. It’s Sodom without a single righteous man. An immense degree of wickedness is required to take from the Palestinians their last piece of land, to occupy it so crudely and to say: everything, absolutely everything is ours, because we are stronger, because we have the power to take it.”

9 Comments

Interesting article. Generations of oppression have given rise to a terrible urban typology. I think every one who donates to Isreali settlement funds and lets our congresspeople send $12 billion in defense aid over there should take this tour and see first hand what there our money is buying. It sick.

i think this is an appropriate follow-up to that other thread a few days ago about architecture, ethics and politics -- yet another wake-up call to those who argue that we overestimate architecture's power to be completely complicit in acts of oppression.

It's o.k. for Jewish people have one place on earth where they are not a minority. More than 99% of land in the Middle East is occupied by Muslims. This is just more propoganda thinly veiled as achitecture news. Put a photo of a crappy development next to a nice village and you can see how mean the Israeli's are.

I've spent quite a bit of time in Israel and the West Bank, and I have to say that much of what's in this article fits in with what I've seen.

I do think it's important to note, though, that many of the academic/intellectual critiques of the settlements come from *within* Israeli society itself. All of the author's cited sources against the settlements come from Israelis, and the list of Israeli journalists, architects, and scholars who work in this area is long:
Akiva Eldar, Gershom Gorenburg, Amir Cheshin, Shaul Arieli, Menachem Klein, Ruth Lapidoth, Meir Margalit, and Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, to name a few.

The architecture departments at Tel Aviv University, the Technion, and Bezalel all run studios that address related issues, and Israel-based organizations such as B'tselem, Shalom Achshav, Ir Amim, and Bimkom ("Planners for Human Rights") publish important research in this field.

All of these voices offer nuanced and principled observations on architecture and settlements in Israel, and worth taking a look at.

occupation is NOT propaganda. regardless of which side we identify with politically we should be more capable of recognizing the fact of people suffering and being held captive their own lands, whether it's in tibet, iraq, or palestine.

Well I dont think Iraquis are being held captive now any more than they were - peace by dictatorial power is worse in the long run.

But the Isreal question is deep and disturbing because while the Isrealis outwardly express a modern, democratic and western image internaly I think Americans fear they know the darker side buried beneath the surface. That said - The tragedy of the eastern European Jews during the Nazi and Stalinist purgings did demand some sort of homeland be extablished. It just was established in the most assanine ways possible. Its time for a Arab/Isreali peace party to step up over there and share the land. Shit - their genetic brothers for peats sake. Holding 2000 year old grudges is soooo medevial.

"darker side"? It is not adequate to use this term to refer to Israel, which really IS a civilized, modern, westernized nation. This term should be saved for the palestines, who rely on terrorism as the only form of organization, dialogue and government that they know. As far as the architecture is concerned, the article, in my opinion, transforms what should be a critic into a political argument, which may be an erroneous choice of judgement. Bad architecture can be found just around the corner where I live and I don't read too much politics or humanity in it.

Mar 26, 08 8:38 pm ·

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